Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde

Jazz Perspectives ISSN: 1749-4060 (Print) 1749-4079 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjaz20 Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde Benjamin Bierman To cite this article: Benjamin Bierman (2015) Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant- Garde, Jazz Perspectives, 9:1, 65-93, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2015.1132517 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2015.1132517 Published online: 28 Jan 2015. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjaz20 Download by: [Benjamin Bierman] Date: 29 January 2016, At: 09:13 Jazz Perspectives, 2015 Vol. 9, No. 1, 65–93, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2015.1132517 Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde Benjamin Bierman Introduction Throughout the early 1980s, Sweet Basil, a popular jazz club in New York City, was regularly packed and infused with energy as the Pharoah Sanders Quartet was slam- ming it—Sanders on tenor, John Hicks on piano, Walter Booker on bass, and Idris Muhammad on drums.1 The music was up-tempo and unflagging in its intensity and drive. The rhythm section was playing with a straight-ahead yet contemporary feel, while Sanders was seamlessly blending the avant-garde or free aesthetic and mainstream straight-ahead jazz, as well as the blues and R&B influences from early in his career.2 This band—and this period of Sanders’s career—have been largely neglected and Sanders himself has generally been poorly represented in the media.3 Sanders, as is true for many, many musicians, suffers from the fact that in critical discourses jazz styles often remain conceptualized as fitting into pre-conceived cat- egories such as straight-ahead, mainstream, and avant-garde or free jazz. Fortunately, 1We have all had our important experiences with live music—performances that, for one reason or another, are memorable or meaningful. The Sweet Basil performances that I attended (mentioned above) have stuck with me, and were quite influential for me as a performer, composer, and bandleader. It is largely in the context of my experience in those musical roles that I examine Sanders’s work here. 2A brief digression is immediately necessary as in the first paragraph of this article, I use the terms mainstream, straight-ahead, and avant-garde. They are all loaded and unspecific terms, few people are happy with them, and there is a wide discrepancy in opinions regarding their definitions. In the same way that musicians frequently dislike the term jazz, these terms are considered to be limiting and unnecessary. However, when talking about music, it is hard to do so without terms and general frames of reference. It is beyond the scope of this article to define theses terms at length, and I am presuming a readership of knowledgeable jazz listeners and scholars. However, as a basic frame of reference (my frame of reference, that is), straight-ahead refers to styles that generally Downloaded by [Benjamin Bierman] at 09:13 29 January 2016 have a swing rhythmic feel and that largely employ tonally based chord progressions. This includes jazz from its inception through styles such as swing, bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, and soul jazz. The term mainstream, though it is also vague and contentious, refers to straight-ahead musicians and styles since the 1960s whose playing forms the core of jazz for most listeners, but generally excludes the avant-garde. A contemporary feel of straight-ahead implies using an up-to-date language and style. In this case I refer to Hicks’s use of fourths voicings on the piano, for example, a walking bass line, and a swing drum feel that is in a contemporary style. The terms avant-garde, free jazz, and the “new thing” refer to the movement that began in the late 1950s and 1960s by such artists as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and are continued by contemporary practitioners using the language of the style. It is a broad genre but, as opposed to straight-ahead, there is often a free approach to rhythm and meter while also maintaining a jazz feel, there is less reliance upon chord progressions—they are often not present, alternative approaches to form are used, and the use of extended or unorthodox instrumental techniques are common. 3In October 2015, Sanders received an NEA Jazz Masters Award along with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and vibraphonist Gary Burton. I was happy to see this somewhat rare recognition of the importance of Sanders and his music. © 2016 Taylor & Francis 66 Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde these terms mean less and less all the time as players are much more freely crossing such boundaries, embracing values which I suggest are central to Sanders’s ability and desire to unselfconsciously blend different styles. I will discuss Sanders’s relationship to these ideas throughout the article. The issues surrounding the vagueness and contentiousness of these terms are central to Sanders’s reception over the years, and also speak to a larger issue in jazz historiography. For example, the term avant-garde is at times con- structed as being diametrically opposed to the terms straight-ahead and mainstream. But since Sanders inhabits both of these worlds, and always has, he stands as an illustra- tive example of an artist that is not easily pigeonholed into a specific category. For jazz critics, this makes him difficult to discuss—and consequently easy to ignore or challen- ging to consider—given the often overly fixed notions of stylistic boundaries in jazz narratives. If he had just been a “free player” it would be easier to place him in a category with artists such as Albert Ayler, late John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and the AACM, but the “mainstream” and “pop” leanings problematize that idea. His playing is “free,” but not “free enough,” yet he is also not “mainstream” enough to be placed into that category either. Consequently, there are two main streams in this article, which on the surface may seem disconnected, but are, in fact, closely linked. In the first half, I discuss Sanders’s recorded output, with particular attention paid to what I consider to be his milestone recordings between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. At the start of this period, Sanders was beginning his association with John Coltrane, an association that would launch him into public consciousness, but would also prove to be somewhat limiting with respect to his critical reception. I close this discussion with an examination of his quartet work in the early 1980s that was more squarely grounded in the jazz mainstream. Between these framing recordings, Sanders negotiates his musical identity within the context of a rapidly shifting jazz world, as well as his growth as a musician. In the second half of the essay I assess the critical response to Sanders and his music to examine his reception, as well as to more fully contextualize his career. Specifically, I argue that, despite his quite varied output, Sanders’s critical reception was hindered by the inability of many critics to move beyond his playing and recording in the 1960s, including his association with the free jazz movement, and with John Coltrane in par- Downloaded by [Benjamin Bierman] at 09:13 29 January 2016 ticular, as well as Sanders’s work in the late 1960s with “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” As a result, Sanders’s more mainstream early 1980s work was at times met with derision, and more often either forgotten or ignored. I posit here that Sanders’s style steadily matured throughout his career and that his music from the early 1980s, exemplified in the 1981 recording Live, exhibits a genre crossing style that seems to have largely confounded critics. In some ways this is understandable, as Pharoah Sanders’s trajectory as a pro- fessional saxophonist would have been difficult to predict in the early stages of his career. His work, however, has demonstrated a fascinating transformation both in his playing and the types of musical settings he chose to surround himself with. The manner in which Sanders gradually and steadily developed while establishing a success- ful commercial career— typified by the Sweet Basil performances I attended, and also Jazz Perspectives 67 captured on his record, Live—particularly intrigues me, and is the primary focus of this article. Sanders first moved from playing the blues and R&B early in his career to being a free player in New York in the 1960s.4 It is at this point where I begin to trace the path of his career through recordings and performances in a variety of settings with various musical approaches. I examine his evolution from John Coltrane’s Meditations (1965), through Karma (1969) and Sanders’s hit, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Thembi (1971), Love Will Find a Way (1977), and eventually to Live (1981). This period of his career (the early 1980s) is frequently overlooked in the literature on Sanders, and when it is discussed it is frequently misunderstood in terms of its relationship to his career as a whole. Sanders’s development, as is the case for all artists, came about for a variety of reasons, including musical and aesthetic choices as well as cultural and social changes throughout his career. It is also, however, the result of commercial and pro- fessional decisions along the way, and we can see this demonstrated through his material and approaches with the various records I discuss below. Interestingly, the trajectory of Sanders’s career is essentially opposite to that of Coltrane.

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